African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 8
C L R James
C L R James was the author of “The Black Jacobins”, about the 1791
revolution that created the world’s first independent black republic, in Haiti.
James also wrote about the game of cricket, and the social
consequences of cricket. He was a great writer, and a revolutionary writer at
that. He was also often in his long life a political actor, together with,
among others his fellow-Trinidadian George Padmore in the 1930s in
London, then later with the Socialist Workers’ Party in the USA from 1938 to
1953, and then back in London and his native Trinidad, West Indies. James died
a famous and a well-respected man, although he had annoyed plenty of people along
the way, but perhaps still under-appreciated as the great political
intellectual that he was.
The linked downloadable text given below is from C L R
James’s 1948 work on G W F Hegel, called “Notes on
Dialectics”. It can serve in this series to show that the ability of the
revolutionary writers to challenge the bourgeoisie at the frontier of
philosophy is crucial, and that African revolutionaries have not been shy to do
so, as difficult as this task may be.
James says in the second paragraph of this text that “The
larger Logic is the most difficult book I know” (meaning the book that is more
often referred to as Hegel’s “Greater Logic”).
Lenin wrote that “It is
impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially
its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of
Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the
Marxists understood Marx!!” Naturally, this applies to Africans as well.
The last great hurdle of Marxist study is Marx’s own master,
Hegel. How well did James do in tackling it? Raya Dunayevskaya, the former
secretary to Leon Trotsky, writing in 1972 when James was
still very much alive, did not think much of his work on Hegel. She accused him
of “skipping”!
But for us, as beginners, James is a great help with Hegel,
and maybe just what we need. He gives us a way in (and so does Andy Blunden
with his “Hegel by Hypertext”). James even
gives an adequate answer to Dunayevskaya in this very text we are using today:
“I am not giving a summary of the Logic. I am not expanding it as a doctrine. I
am using it and showing how to begin to know it and use it.” This is what we
want: an opening (in French: ouverture).
African revolutionary theory and practice cannot be
separated from the world’s general revolutionary history, neither
chronologically, nor geographically, nor in relative sophistication. Nor can it
be said that one is derivative of the other. It is precisely when the African
revolutionary heritage is looked at, that this inseparability becomes apparent.
On MIA there is a C L
R James Archive at http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/index.htm.
We have chosen, for the purposes of this section, to take a
sample of C L R James on Hegel. But in terms of the African Revolutionary
Writers Series as a whole we would equally benefit from the following
relatively less historical and more narrative items that are in the MIA James
Archive:
- Black
Power, 1967
- Reflections
on Pan-Africanism, 1973
- Walter
Rodney and the Question of Power, 1981
These later articles are to a large extent reflections by
James on the interplay of revolutionary literature with the mass political
movements that have changed the African political landscape in the 20th
Century.
They can therefore be read as reinforcing, or contrasting
with, the remarks of Eduardo Mondlane, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and soon, Walter
Rodney, that we have used for this course. You may also take all these articles
as validating the editorial choices and comments that have been used in the
construction of this course; or alternatively you may regard them as a good
exposure of the inadequacies of this course.
Either way, it is the problematisation of all these
overviews of the literature which can be educational, especially if
problematisation is followed by face-to-face dialogue and discussion.
Please
download and read the text via this link:
C L R James, The Hegelian
Logic, 1948 (3692 words)
Further reading:
Huey P Newton, Speech
at Boston College, 1970 (6283 words)
Muammar Gaddafi, The
One-State Solution, 2009 (939 words)
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